[Infowarrior] - FUD Alert: Piracy "more serious" than burglary, fraud, bank robbery

[Richard Forno]

Copyright coalition: piracy more serious than burglary, fraud, bank robbery

By Ken Fisher | Published: June 15, 2007 - 11:57AM CT

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070615-copyright-coalition-piracy-mor
e-serious-than-burglary-fraud-bank-robbery.html

For the more than nine years that Ars Technica has been publishing online,
we've been outspoken when it comes to the lack of balance between the threat
of piracy (which is always overstated) and the "solutions" to piracy (which
are often draconian) that some copyright holders demand. Whether it's laws
that would turn the possession of software into a crime, completely baked
piracy reports, or yet another law meant to criminalize civil infractions,
we've cast a critical eye on an industry that defines solipsism.

And, everyone once and while, we're accused of hyperbole, of exaggerating
our objections. That's why it's with both a grin and a lonely tear that I
report to you the latest ridiculous claim from the copyright-trumps-all
brigade.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes
entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and
bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If
you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country,
everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it
costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs
to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul
Stweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

There are two obvious rejoinders to such a ridiculous statement. The first
is that "hundreds of billions of dollars a year" is a myth. The MPAA's own
cherry-picked study from Smith Barney in 2005 put their annual loss at less
than $6 billion, and while the music and software industries also like to
publish trumped-up claims, the figures are nowhere near hundreds of billions
of dollars each year.

The second objection, of course, is that the traditional crimes Cotton
describes often involve the destruction of people's lives along with
property. Burglaries can result in homicide, as can fraud (ask the
preacher's wife), while bank robbery is without a doubt a dangerous game.
Those crimes also typically involve real property. For better or for worse,
real property should not be confused with intellectual property, which is
not subject to the same rules of scarcity. Stopping a bank heist is, without
a doubt, a far more important matter than stopping the bootlegging of Gigli
or Spiderman 3.

Chances are you would prefer that the cops spend their efforts protecting
people from rampant home burglaries than chasing down kids with pirated
music on their iPods.

Regardless, Cotton and his Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy are
seeking to change federal law enforcement emphasis so that intellectual
property crimes are given priority over other kinds of crime... a
realignment, to play off Cotton's statement. Battling organized crime is
hardly objectionable, and we hope the coalition sees success in taking down
the profiteers of piracy. Offending the public with yet more lies and
hyperbole isn't going to curry much favor, however.